The IEEE 1149.1 standard was adopted in 1990. Built upon the work of the Joint Test Action Group (JTAG), it provided a pins-out view from one IC pad to another to help test engineers locate and discover faulty PC boards. A description of the boundary scan description language was added in 1994.
Complications arose as chips increased functionality and designs shifted away from PC boards to multichip modules and stacked die packages. These difficulties included handling the pin count requirements and multiple Test Access Port (TAP) controllers for System-on-Chip (SoC) devices, testing multichip modules and stacked die configurations, enhancing debug performance, and improving test and debug logic power-down in low-power conditions.
Organizations like the Mobile Industry Processor Interface Alliance and the NEXUS 5001 Forum took up the challenge to solve the problems specific to their industries.